


Indecent Bedfellows

by CatsDog



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Character Development, Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, Growing Up, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 02:10:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6781096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatsDog/pseuds/CatsDog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tragedy strikes the skies of London as Talon, the notorious terrorist organization, detonates a bomb on a nearly full load of London Air Flight 217.  Leaving Jillian Aspora orphaned, she finds herself caught in a tug of war between Overwatch and the terrorist syndicate who are in a race against each other to leverage the girl, her inherited fortune, and the secrets that Talon had hoped died with her parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Two hours ago the London skyline had been the vibrant, albeit stale hue of blue and white skyscrapers with paneled windows that looked black in the night. Rush hour traffic had died out hours ago, so that the only lights on the wet city avenues were the white and orange headlights of graveyard workers, late night liaisons and businessmen and women that had labored in their offices at the expense of their families. 

Some of those commuters might have looked up at the sound of the aircraft splitting the air, shooting straight into the sky from Heathrow International and shrugging through sound and sonic barriers in its climb. Like most craft of its day, London Air Flight 217 was a fat, bulky vessel with a thicker belly than wingspan and half a dozen small rotary engines to help generate lift.

London Air Flight 217 had been unusually full for an 11 o’clock flight, with only enough room for nine more passengers. Chance and perhaps fate had brought a host of travelers together that would each layover in Coppenhagen, before splitting their ways between Stockholm, Helsinki, and Prague. The sudden rush to spread across the continent could most likely be attributed to the active market day, which had seen a roller coaster of stock values rising and plummeting, futures changing so many hands that it even dizzied the professional accountants and database managers of the London Exchange, and somewhere in the midst of it all thousands of assets had changed hands across continental Europe. Now hundreds of corporate officers were seizing as many plane tickets as they could to assess their new acquisitions.

At eight thousand feet, the pilots reported an unusual lethargy and requested advice from the tower. There was a sudden scurry of activity as the guidance officers pondered the peculiarity of two pilots simultaneously complaining of the same fatigue. As they were drawing up as many contingency plans as possible in an attempt to avoid the recreation of some early 20th century comedy film, a sudden, piercing static caused the air traffic controls to in unison tear their headphones from their ears. 

Moments later, with the traffic controllers’ ears still ringing from the sudden assault, eyes were drawn to the sky at the sound of a new, violent boom. Even from eight thousand feet in the air, the burst of the explosion that saw orange flames spewing and vomiting in typhoon looking swirls through the air. A plume of black smoke tried to obscure it, but the flames darted out in every direction, shattering windows and sending waterfalls of glass onto the street below.

What remained of the husk of London Air Flight 217, a blackened fuselage and two bent wings, tumbeled back down to the earth, sending drivers scurrying through red lights and often times into each other due to the uncertainty of the tumbling aircraft’s trajectory.

The smoldering remains plummeted into a tenement block, killing fifteen residents instantly, though another five died from smoke inhalation. All two hundred and fifty one passengers aboard were killed and though it was quietly agreed to tell the papers they had died instantly in the explosion, investigations into bodies that had fallen within miles around the crash site made it clear that others had tragically survived until impact.

The victims were lined up in several, long rows across the avenue in front of the ruined tenement block, draped in white sheets to spare their modesty. The drapes were a canvas were red and blue, scintillating lights danced as five different divisions stood about, sharing information, examining evidence, playing with their tablets and each reaching their own conclusions.

The only agreement they could come to collectively was that the reports of pilot fatigue moments before the blast all but ruled out the possibility of an accident. One or two junior officers had tried to argue the merits of a methane or carbon monoxide leak that precipitated the explosion, but they were dismissed outright. Each of the investigators were trained enough hands to know that the profile of the explosion was no accidentally occurring, natural affair.

The pavement and asphalt were wet from a heavy rain early in the evening, reflecting back in glistening prisms the emergency response lights on the tops of the gathered cars surrounding the grim rows of the deceased.

Instinct against the sight, let alone the feeling of the chill caused Lena Oxton to tug at the collar of her jacket, bringing it closer to the bristling hairs on the back of her neck. Her lips were twisted in grim mourning and a hint of despair at the sight of so many death shawls. No matter how many times she tried, she always seemed to lose count trying to tally the lost.

A man who had clearly spent too many years investigating the worst offenses humanity could inflict upon itself, leaving him looking sanguine and hollow with a neglected scruff of beard, stepped next to her, his patent leather heels clicking on the wet cobblestone.

“Two hundred and seventy,” he told her, stuffing his tablet under his arm. “Two hundred and fifty one in the plane, nineteen in the apartment.”

“By me…” Lena muttered, taking a step away as though the gravity of the number had driven her back. 

She felt the eyes of other investigators and officers watching her, scrutinizing her every move. They carried the same toxic air as some dive bar accosted and claimed by a gang, with Lena having worked in wearing the wrong colors. 

It was no secret that her summoning had been a tacit, begrudging admission of some sort of defeat, that London Metropolitan and even the more prestigious, Royal intelligence and security forces were in over their head. Her arrival had been accepted in hostile silence only because their superiors could think of no other options.

Except, Lena noted, for the man at her right, the skeletal looking agent in the long, black trench coat who had seen most of his strong feelings on any matter dashed by the hundreds of bodies he had been forced to investigate in his career.

“Special Agent Hammond,” he explained. “Special Agent Ruthford was to be your special liaison but he is…” Hammond pursed his lips and seemed to catch whatever words in a tether before they could escape. He carefully added, “indisposed.”

“Pilot complained of an achin’ belly ‘fore things went bottom up?”

Hammond nodded. “Stomach pains. Fatigue. Lethargy.”

“Reckon it wasn’t no food poisonin’.”

“Agreed. How thoroughly were you briefed?”

“Thorough as one would. Why?” Hammond stared at her in silence until she sighed and rolled her shoulders. “Unless there’s somethin’ I missed, seems awful like Talon. Poison gas gives the pilots the what for, remote detonated package or may even a suicide type sittin’ in economy class, then bob’s your uncle.”

“Right on all points,” Hammond agreed.

“Not to put too much the piss on so fine an invitation,” Lena sneered, “but sounds as you chaps have it all figured out. So what am I doin’ here?”

As though the answer lay somewhere in that tablet of his, Hammond produced it from under his arm and swiped through several screens.

“It has all the marks of a Talon hit, yes?”

Lena rolled her eyes. “I just said aye.”

“And when’s the last time they’ve gone after a small, civilian airliner with no connections?”

Lena opened her mouth to answer, then slammed it shut with a clatter of her teeth. Talon’s attacks were notorious for their intensity, their daring, their brutality. But they always had a logic to them, no matter how twisted. Their objectives were always clear in hindsight, if not foresight. The two hundred bodies in front of her were a madness that seemed to lack any kind of method, any kind of consistency with the organization’s tactics in the past.

In the wake of London Air Flight 217’s gruesome end, all Lena could find herself saying was, “Oh…”


	2. Chapter 2

No matter where Jillian went, no matter how she tried to spend her day, the specter of London Air Flight 217 seemed to want to follow her. Songs listened to on private music devices were broken by advertisements imploring listeners to donate to the families who fell victim to the terrorist attack, every public setting had their holovids switched to news stations that continued round the clock reports on the same information wrapped up and delivered in different ways.

Even entertainment and comedy shows were marred by mourning and tear stricken hosts that railed against the inhumanity of the attacks, accosted by pundits who went out of their way to drum one position or the other in the wake of the crisis.

It was too much for Jillian, who tossed her music player across the backseat of the cab she was riding in, not even offering so much as a care or regard to where it landed as another ad for the victims of Flight 217 played. The taxi driver tossed her a quick glance in the rearview mirror, before his eyes fell again on the London road.

Jillian’s life had been consumed by Flight 217 since the night she received the dread nocturnal phone call. When the phone rang, breaking her from a nap that she had not realized she had slipped into with a piercing shriek, she thought immediately of something her mother had said years ago.

“Best to unplug the phone at night,” she had said, tears smearing black eye liner down her cheeks. “No good calls come after dark.”

They had just received news that Jillian’s uncle, her mother’s brother, had been killed in an automobile accident. When asked, any family member would politely explain that he had died due to a drunk driving incident, but it was their inner secret that he had been the one so sloshed that the coroner found more alcohol than blood in his veins.

That made Jillian’s blood run cold when she saw the red and blue lights of the phone blinking to the harmony of the noise. She could not put any two thoughts together, could not rationalize or picture what it was she so dreaded as she picked up the receiver with a trembling hand, but it was the only tangible emotion she could conjure.

The news was as bad as she had predicted. Both her parents had been on Flight 217, intending on a layover in Copenhagen before continuing to Prague. She had vaguely recalled that they were bound for Hungary, but until that moment Jillian had precious few moments to spare on the intineraries of her family, so distant, so far removed from her life at Oxford.

“Flight 217 to Copenhagen?” Jillian repeated into the phone. “That’s impossible.” She knew how tired and delirious she must have sounded. “My parents were on their way to Prague.”

“Yes, I’m afraid with a layover in Copenhagen.”

Silence as Jillian tried to process the information. It was too much at once, too much for her tired heart that was being clenched by a grip of tight wreaths, burning as hot as the fireball that had been seen over the London skyline.

She answered no more questions and asked none for herself. Instead she clicked the phone back into place and curled back to sleep. Jillian had no memory of waking up and crying, but her pillow had been damp from tears.

The next week had been a dizzying ride of meetings with more attorneys than she thought actually existed in London, discussions and questions with just as many police and investigators, and rehashing every painful moment of her familial life until her emotions had been rubbed raw. Her heart no longer hurt, instead it simply felt calloused. Her throat was always dry and no amount of water seemed sufficient to satisfy her thirst.

In addition, her fingers felt as though they had been filed to small nubs with all the papers she had been forced to sign. Although she was an only child, some part of her was still surprised to discover that she had remained the sole heir to her parents’ estate. She had not seen them since departing for Oxford and their conversations had been strained, curt. Jillian would be visibly annoyed by the obligation of speaking to either of them, while they tried to use the only thing they knew to try to win her friendship: their money.

And now they were gone and all the money in the world seemed to be hers. At the end of the taxi’s journey was one last row of documents to place her signature to, then her family’s impressive fortune belonged to Jillian, strewn across assets waiting to be liquidated, a dozen trusts, and a number of private expense accounts. Her lawyer had laughed in spite of the grim prospect of an inheritance.

“Enough there to spoil you like a bad egg,” he had joked before he ever finished reading through the wills. Jillian had not found his mirth amusing. A part of her had contemplated using her newly acquired fortune to simply buy his firm and find him some job that required his desk to be relocated among the plumbing.

The taxi pulled before the building leased by her attorney’s office with an abrupt stop, the tires screeching. 

“Apologies ma’am,” he assured her. “Not used to clients comin’ this deep into, well, not used to around here.”

Jillian shook her head. Neither was she. She paid the agreed fare, retrieved her discarded music player and her overnight bag that served as equal parts satchel and purse, and climbed out of the cab.

The inside of the office building smelled of wealth. Jillian imagined an army of custodians waiting until all potential eyes had disappeared, then appeared like elves from some fairy tale brandishing cans of new car smell and peppermint. The sound of running water was present everywhere in the building, even when there was no sign of the impressive gold and marble fountain in the rotunda.

Jillian did not have to wait long and she suspected that most of the day had been cleared for her. She did not know precisely how much she was set to inherit, matters of finance were never discussed with her, but it was apparent that the firm handling the execution of the wills meant to make no small fortune of her own.

Perhaps it was better that she did not know all the details. She wanted only to see the final numbers at the end, then it felt less like parting with whatever absurd rates they took for themselves.

At first she tried to listen to the details, the words that may as well have been in some exotic language for all the sense they made to her. Eventually she merely stared off into the distance, trying to numb the maelstrom of feelings that seemed to ride a current throughout her body, trying to focus on the memories of her music. Her trance was only broken when she was nudged to initial here and sign there. Jillian’s hand began to ache and her signature began to become less and less coherent. The fanciful loops of her J became sad droops like an overweight oak tree and her L’s became haphazardly merged with her I’s so that it eventually looked as though she were scratching JIIIIN.

By the time they were finished, Jillian was exhausted, rubbing at the under side of her hand that was slicked black with ink. Looking up at the host of lawyers and bankers whose names she could never be bothered to remember, they looked like so many lions staring down a gazelle with their wicked grins and lean, hunter’s eyes.

The fat man in the middle thumbed through the stack of documents and when he was satisfied he huffed out an exasperated sigh. Then his face contorted as an actor’s would when slipping into character before the call of action. He wore a veneer of regret and despair, despite the giddy flicker of his eyes.

“I am terribly sorry for your loss,” he told her, sticking a clip at the end of the stack of papers to hold them into place and sliding it over to his associates. “Becker, Becker and Raymond sincerely hope that the ease of this transition will help to relieve the burden of this terrible loss.”

Jillian stared at the man for several moments. No words that did not drip with contempt came to her, so instead she reached into her pocket and found her small metal container of snus. The little baggies of nicotine were a nasty habit that she had been hoping to kick, but the cataclysm of Flight 217 seemed to guarantee that all attempts would be futile. Her heart felt heavy at the thought of her mother’s disapproval, the way her face would droop, languid as she sorted her daughter’s laundry, only to find the small cannister.

Now she would never know.

“We done?” Jillian finally asked when they showed no immediate signs of dismissing her.

The lawyers and bankers exchanged glances. The fat one in the center raised a calming hand to his companions.

“We’ll mail you over the copies for you own records.”

Jillian raised a hand, snatched her satchel, and turned her back to them. On the elevator ride back to the lobby she raised a cab on her phone, then waited with her hands in her pockets on the curb. She had planned to return to listening to music, however the reality of what she had just done hit her so hard in the chest that it robbed her of breath.

Despair had crept onto the edges of her mind ever since that call in the dead of night, yet she had always managed to push the reality of the situation somewhere off to the side. Some childish, infantile hope always remained that the dispute she’d had with her estranged family would end and she would receive a more pleasant, midday phone call to inform her that they had been mistaken. Her parents had, in fact, taken an earlier flight to Prague and they apologized for the mistake.

Placing the name Jillian Aspora onto each of those documents was the final confirmation. Her family was dead.

Jillian was alone.


	3. Chapter 3

There had been no follow up attacks from Talon, despite an entire nation put on careful alert. Paranoia had swept through the streets and London’s already prejudice and fear of omnics had reached a near frenzy. Although there was no noticeable connection between Talon and the robotic creatures, that did little to stem the tide of conspiracy theories that swore that only an omnic could have brought the bomb aboard Air London Flight 217, or that Talon had seized some sort of main frame to control Great Britain’s population of cybernetics.

It was frustrating to watch from the regional Overwatch headquarters. A holovid with dozens of sub-displays showing as many different channels presented an overload of information, dizzying to follow in its conflicting, paranoid information. From her black and silver chair, the circular Overwatch seal at the head of the seat, Lena wanted to cry out and argue with each of the pundits, each of the interviewed know nothings that spewed their rhetoric and idiotic theories.

She was powerless, watching like behind the bars of some cell as the idiocy of humankind in a panic unfurled itself before her.

As the only one still at the regional headquarters this late into the night, Lena abandoned any sense of decorum. She had slid almost the entire length down her seat, so that she was half bent, legs sprawled outward so that she was folded nearly onto herself, looking upside down at the screens. Her fingers would occasionally point at one of the smaller displays in front of her and swipe, bringing up another channel with different faces saying more of the same.

On the console in front of her a tablet full of unread reports and boring lists of names, specifications and who knew what else remained unread. She had tried to read through the reports, to do her part to parse the information, but her eyes had glazed over and she felt an itch somewhere in the back of her neck that could not be scratched the more she tried to process.

Overwatch had fallen onto a sad state of affairs when the reading of documents had fallen to her. Most of their outposts had been staffed by skeleton crews, sometimes, as with London, with only a single agent supported by a host of androids and omnic volunteers. 

It was not that Lena did not take the matter seriously. She had struggled to sleep since that day, haunted in her dreams by rows of white sheets in the shapes of bodies. It had bothered her enough that one morning she stood over her own bed, shuddering at the sight of the white linen, then in a fit tossed it into the incinerator, preferring the shag of a bare mattress to the haunting memories of Flight 217.

One of the helpful omnics had taken note of her discomfort and replaced the linens with black satin.

“Aren’t you a dove?” she said, squeezing the small, white animatron into a hug and diving into the fresh sheets, emancipated from the nightmares at last.

Lena was interrupted from her thoughts by the clapping sound of synthetic alloys across the floor. Scrunching higher into the chair, navigating with the bending of her spine as a worm would, her head hung off the edge of the chair, hair dangling to watch as the omnic approached. He was short and stout, round like a pot, with stubby little legs that looked like white and black plungers.

“Tracer,” the omnic spoke with the crisp, neutral accent that could only be robotic in origin, devoid of emotion. “Are you ready to prepare the report for Gibraltar?”

Lena groaned and thrashed about in her chair, the action causing her to slip and slide until her feet found the floor and she rose to her full height. With the omnic still scrutinizing her she frowned and glanced contemptuously at the tablet that was sitting on the console.

“No…” she finally conceded in a long, infantile whine. The omnic’s cylindrical face remained entirely passive, but Lena could not shake the feeling that it was judging her through those flat, black lines that made up its face. “I can’t make sense of any of this. I know, let’s just go rope some Talon guys and knock ‘em about until they give the goods.”

Realizing that they were at an impasse, the omnic snatched the tablet, its photoreceptors darting through the information displayed at a blinding speed.

“Why didn’t you say you’d be willing to help before?” Lena pouted, falling back into the chair and swinging it toward the holo displays in front of her. The omnic did not answer. She peered at him with a sidelong glance. “Can’t you just, download all of that or something?”

“No,” the omnic answered, as though the curt response told her all she needed to know.

Lena rolled her eyes and tucked her feet underneath her, exchanging glances between the depressing news reports and the omnic as he devoured the information in front of him. She wondered in that moment if omnics were capable of boredom and distraction. 

“The passenger manifest shows nothing suspicious, but I confess I may have missed a detail.”

“You? Miss a detail?” Lena swiped at him through the air, though the playful gesture seemed lost on the perpetually stoic face of the omnic. “Um, let’s not go through it piece by piece. Not thinkin’ that’ll go over too well, put me to sleep and all that.”

The omnic slowly placed the tablet back down on the keyboard of the console, the first gesture she had seen that bordered on annoyance from the bot.

“Gibraltar requires our report, Tracer.”

“I know,” she whined. “But what am I supposed to do? You said yourself there’s nothin’ on the manifests.” She grabbed the tablet and began swiping through the screens. “We know it’s a typical Talon toxin. We know the bomb had to have been rigged in there way before take off. There ain’t nothin’ to learn.”

“Then perhaps we should put that in the report.”

The only thing less appealing than studying the endless stream of data to fill out a report was sending a blank one back to Winston. He would always say that no news is the same as any news, but in so many ways it still felt like turning in an incomplete homework assignment. She groaned and looked back at the onslaught of news displays, as though they would have some sort of answer.

Lena began to close down each of the panels, one by one with a tap through the air of her fingers. Perhaps she could satisfy her research without the easy distractions on the console she thought. She lingered on the last display a few moments as she recognized the enormous white London’s Eye. There was a crowd of reporters following after a young girl, pink haired with black tips that was using an overnight bag to try to shield her face from the onslaught of cameras.

Her curiosity piqued, Lena turned up the volume so she could hear.

“Young Jillian Aspora received a staggering fortune today after the tragic death of her parents on London Air Flight 217. The daughter of Peter and Cynthia Aspora, both independently wealthy from separate ventures in robotech and pharmaceutical careers, is attending Oxford University. Although reluctant to speak to reporters, she has said that she hopes to use her inheritance to help increase the quality of life in the poor side of Calais, where she lived for several years, having moved there from her home in San Diego more than ten years ago.”

Lena blinked several times. “Poor girl.”

“Perhaps we should talk to her,” the omnic suggested, earning a glare from Lena.

“Poor girl’s suffered enough, don’t ya’ think?”

If the omnic felt any emotion he did not show it. “It’s a start.”

Lena frowned and watched as the girl retreated into a yellow and white taxi that zipped away from the London Eye. One would never guess her wealth by looking at her or her means of travel. She could not deny that something drove her to agree with the omnic, causing Lena to let out a long sigh and heave of her shoulders.

“Alright,” she agreed with a sigh, falling back into the chair. “But only if she agrees to it, yeah?”

The omnic nodded. “I’ll see to the arrangements,” he said before turning on his suction cup like heels and trotting away.


End file.
